This morning, Dallas police Chief David Brown stood by his assertion that this year’s drastic reduction in petty shoplifting cases resulted from a crackdown on fencing operations, not from a policy that makes it harder for shopkeepers to report the crime.

During this morning’s City Council public safety committee meeting, council member Sheffie Kadane asked the chief directly about what’s happened with the shoplifting stats.

Brown acknowledged the Dallas Morning News investigation, saying he disagreed with assertions in it. The drop, he said, is because his department’s crackdown on fences has thieves running scared.

“We’re trying something new, and it’s starting to work,” Brown said, adding that the department has shut down 70 fence operations this year. He did not say how this could have caused the drop considering almost all of these busts were made well afterward.

“Encouraging people not to buy stolen property is a great message to send,” he said. “When you buy stolen property you encourage thieves to steal more.”

None of the other council members present — Pauline Medrano, Delia Jasso or Carolyn Davis — asked any more about it.

As you can see above, petty shoplifting cases in Dallas plummeted on the day police implemented a new policy making it harder for shopkeepers to report them.

But Dallas police Chief David Brown says that good police work, not the policy change, led to the drop. He said his department’s new crackdown on “fences” — people who buy and sell stolen goods — drove shoplifting lower.

Now that the crime stats from last year are in, Houston has slipped into second and Dallas into third. That’s a big coup for city officials, who have made lowering the city’s position on this list one of their top priorities in recent years.

“Of the three cities over 1 million in Texas, Dallas is now the safest,” says First Assistant City Manager Ryan Evans.

To get out of the top spots, the city has substantially increased the size of its police force. But police officials have also changed their procedures for reporting crime. Some of the changes have conformed to federal guidelines. A Dallas Morning News investigation last year showed that other changes have not. Former police Chief David Kunkle said the guidelines aren’t clear and it wouldn’t be wise to follow them like they were “in the Bible.”

This is really worth a listen, whether you’re interested in crime reporting or not. The stuff about NYPD crime stats doesn’t come into play until the second half of Act 2. It’s fascinating, and a little chilling.

Coincidentally, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch had a story yesterday about how their PD made legitimate crime reporting changes that caused their stats go down — but without telling anybody. So it looked like actual crime was going down, when it was really just a numbers-keeping change.

A city audit of how the Dallas Police Department collects crime statistics found that DPD “makes a good faith effort” to comply with federal guidelines and that its numbers “appear substantially correct,” according to a report just released today by the city auditor.

While the report did single out “opportunities for DPD to improve,” the auditor’s conclusions appear markedly less damning than those of a Dallas Morning News investigation last year. The News found that DPD lets hundreds and perhaps thousands of offenses slip from the city’s crime tally each year by not following federal guidelines.